Islam (part II)

The
Moghreb artist varied the form of the arcades and gave diversity of aspect as
between one hall and another, one alcove and another, in the mosques and
especially in the palaces, the alcazars and the alhambras of Andalusia, where
one's enervated fancy wanders from the halls of red and gold, black, emerald,
or turquoise blue to the great colonnaded courts, to the paved gardens where
the perfume of the lemon trees, the mimosas, and the orange trees weighs on the
stifling air, and to the motionless shadows under which basins of marble offer
to the yews long mirrors of pure water in which to dip their image. Empty of
animate forms, the mind of the Moghreb artist sought restlessly to break the
monotony of its plastic visions by combining familiar lines and twisting them
in every direction. The semicircular arch drew its points together, curved
itself into a horseshoe, was narrowed, foreshortened, splayed, loaded with
stalactites, with cells like those of a beehive, and was fretted to a greater
or less extent with festoons and lacework. And when the formula was exhausting
itself there came the arabesque that bit into the stone, carved into openwork
the plaster moldings wherein the stained-glass windows were incased, and
invaded the rectangular framework of the arcades. It sent its winding flame
even to the inner surfaces—blue, red, white, and gold—of the niches and vaults
that offered an escape from the world outside, from the sun and the soil whose
torrid uniformity heightened the charm of the multicolored paradises stretching
out in the cool shadow and the silence over the perfumed waters and the soft
divans.

When
linear ornament had attained its full sweep, it invaded the mosque, like the
alcazar, from the base of the walls to the top of the cupolas. Disdainful or
ignorant of the form of a world that offered little to attract the eye, the
Arab had the time to pursue, to combine, to vary, and to multiply his
arabesques. In the interlacing rosework, the polygonal ornaments, the stylized
inscriptions, all the ornamental motifs issuing together from a vague and
subtle imagination, ecstasy, doubt, serenity, and distress were expressed by
the obliqueness, the verticality, the waviness, the detours, and the
horizontality of the lines. All the ornamental motifs corresponded with the
obscure and complex ensemble of man's feelings and were developed to the point
of mingling, superimposing, and juxtaposing themselves in squares, circles,
bands, ovals, and fans. They passed without apparent effort—like the soul
itself—from exaltation to depression, from reverie to logic, from rectangular
forms to rounded forms, and from the fantasy of the unrestrained curves to the
severities of the geometrical figures. Everything that detached from the walls,
the nimbars [In Moorish architecture
the term for the niche in the mosque indicating the direction of Mecca.], the
banisters, and the gratings, was embroidered with interlacing lines; stone and
plaster were perforated, wood was inlaid, plaques of bronze, silver, and gold
were carved. . . An immense system of tapestries and embroideries seems to be
spread over the walls, to cover the arcades, to distribute the light from the
windows, and sometimes to fall on the cupolas and the graded minarets where the
interlacings and the arabesques became more and more complicated. The whole
thing became like a hanging fairyland, like cobwebs in the great garden of
space, dust, and sunlight.

The
arabesque had had its hour of concrete life. Geometric ornament, into which it
was to evolve, is never born spontaneously; it realizes, in the brain of the
artists, the final stylization of a motif from nature, just as the mathematical
formula is, for the scientist, the form of expression which a truth derived
from experience must take, and thereby grow inert. The arabesque was born of
the twining together of flowers and leaves, as we first find it around the
arcades of the old mosque of Ibn-Touloun at Cairo, when, after the end of the
conquest, the imagination of the Arabs was less tense and had the leisure to
become complicated and the desire to become subtler. It took on a far rarer
quality when the fourteenth century had fixed its law of decoration. And this
progressive passage from the living line to the ideographic line, from the
ideographic to the geometric line, sharply defines the spiritual direction of
this art. When the regular polygon made its appearance in the répertoire of ornament, the Arab
geometrists tried to deduce from it general principles which would permit them
to extend the system of the polygon to the whole of decoration. Arab art, from
that time on, became an exact science [A formula drew from the polygon and
brought back to it all the geometrical motifs and decorations.] and allowed the
reverie of the mystic to be inclosed in the hard language of perfectly bare
abstraction.

Born of
the desert, where there are no forms, where space alone reigns and has neither
beginning nor end, Arabian spirituality found its supreme expression in the
arabesque which also has neither beginning nor end. The eye cannot come to rest
on it. It is like those voices of the silence that we hear and follow in their
interminable round when we listen only to ourselves, and when our feelings and
ideas are enmeshed confusedly in a kind of languid pleasure which we experience
when we allow our consciousness to become closed to the impressions of the
world. If the reverie aims to reach some conclusion, if the metaphysical
abstraction seeks to clarify itself, it can find no other language—since it has
remained outside of life— than the mathematical abstraction which compels the
mind to move in an absolute of convention.

It is
singular that the most precise of the languages that we employ, the most useful
to our modern civilizations, should also be the one which—when we seek
disinterestedly the pleasure of its abstract creations—should awaken in us only
those sentiments that are most lacking in precision and most impossible to
seize upon. It is singular that this instrument of pure mind should serve only
our most material needs, and that, when used to explore the spiritual world, it
should be the most impotent of all in penetrating its mystery. All-powerful when
we desire to know what motionless matter is, it is of no use whatever as soon
as we seek enlightenment regarding living matter in its activity and its
evolution. If it is an incomparable weapon for a mind that dominates it, it is
dead for a mind that can be dominated by it.

Art,
like life itself, is in a constant state of evolution. If scientific certainty
is perchance substituted in the soul of the artist for the desire for that
certitude which not only torments him but gives him strength, the need for effort
is destroyed within him, and enthusiasm weakens because static realization has
replaced the constant renewal of desire. When mathematics is introduced into
the domain of the artists, it should remain in the hands of the architects as
an instrument whose purpose is to define and determine the logic of the
edifices they construct. But architecture cannot pretend to do more than adapt
a building to its utilitarian function and suggest, by the direction of its
lines, the most powerful, but also the vaguest, of the great collective
sentiments. It is not the prerogative of mathematics to monopolize form and
thereby inclose it within a wall of pure abstraction. When it prevents
sculpture from developing and the painted image from being born, it condemns the
people which it expresses to remain slaves to the temporary form, which they
had given to their idea; it condemns them to die.

What
endows it with its greatness endows it also with its weakness. It is slain by
the realization of its purposes. It does not renew itself, since the individual
cannot break the definitive formulas in which, by its own will, it had inclosed
itself. The mosque and the Arabian world grow motionless together, exactly at
the moment when the Occidental peoples are emerging from the collective
rhythms. It is in the hope of a discovery half seen that men gain the power
they express in their work, and from this moment on the mosque builders begin
to lose courage.

If the
desert reveals to men the unity of mind, it is also responsible for the mind's
forgetting the few forms that are presented. From the desert came the
antisocial and anticivilizing conception of the two irreconcilable worlds of
the immaterial soul and the material body. After the death of a people that has
failed to discover and to express its accord with the external universe, there
remains nothing of that people, however great its courage; the spirit which men
follow is that which knows how to animate with its life the forms of that
universe. It is the rocks, the water, and the trees which, through the spirit
of the Greeks, made the Occident fertile. Every time that history hesitates, we
look to the pediments of the temples where men recognize themselves in the
gods.